I am managing a website that was built by a 3rd party provider that no longer offers support for the web site. We recently found out from our hosting provider that they were upgrading PHP versions. Their e-mail is as follows.

"We will upgrade PHP to the latest 4.x version (4.4.9); We will migrate from an Apache Module to a CGI-based installation that gives you more control over many PHP settings. Once implemented, you will have the ability to upload your very own php.ini file into your cgi-bin folder as needed. After the upgrade, your website may experience a few errors, all of which can be quickly resolved. Most are caused by having PHP directives inside an .htaccess file. To fix this problem, simply login to your control panel and click on the WebShell icon. The .htaccess file will not be viewable unless you have "show hidden files" checked in your WebShell settings. Open the .htaccess file and remove any lines that start with "php_". If you need to retain these settings, then they must now go into a php.ini file and placed into your cgi-bin folder. If you are running PHP in any of your HTM/HTML files, please add this line to your .htaccess file: AddHandler php-script .php .php3 .php4 .htm .html .phtml"

Ok so as far as things I have done. I added the line to my .htaccess file and made sure there were no lines starting with "php_". I haven't done anything with a php.ini file due to the fact I am not sure what to include in this file.

The site used to be formatted into a header, a sidebar, the body, and a footer. Right now none of this formatting is showing up and the site is coming up as pretty much plain text. Please let me know if just adding a php.ini file or adjusting my .htaccess file will fix this issue.

    Egad! They're "upgrading" to a PHP 4 version when PHP 4 support has been discontinued since 2007-12-31?

    Anyway, when you load a non-functioning page from your site, do you see the actual PHP code (you may have to do a "view source")? If so then the server is not recognizing it as PHP, and you probably still need to do something with your .htaccess file.

    If that's not the issue, try changing your php.ini file to turn on display_errors and set error_reporting to E_ALL. This may at least get your pages to display some debug info if there is some issue with the overall configuration settings having an effect (such as a dependency on register_globals or a change in the include_path setting).

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